In what is starting to look like COINTELPRO updated and outsourced for the 21st century, it was recently revealed that cybersecurity firm ZeroFox monitored at least two high-profile Black Lives Matter protest organizers and labeled them as 'physical threats' in secret reports to Baltimore city administrators and to an unnamed 'classified partner' organization at Fort Meade (headquarters of the NSA and other intelligence agencies).
McKesson and Elzie both tell Mother Jones they were "not surprised" that they were being watched. "It confirms that us telling the truth about police violence is seen as a threat," McKesson says. Both activists say they do not know why they were identified as physical threats. McKesson and Elzie live in Missouri, where they helped organize the Ferguson protests. They traveled together to Baltimore for a week and a half during the Freddie Gray protests.
This classification of non-violent political protesters as threats follows the nationwide, FBI-orchestrated purge of the Occupy movement that was legally enabled by labeling them a terrorist threat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:11PM
When police refuse to do their jobs, vigilantism is inevitable. Citizens delegate justice to the legal system to ensure fairness and impartiality, but when the justice system continually fails to serve justice for years and even decades or longer, the citizens' hands are forced and they have no choice but to rescind the power they delegated and take matters into their own hands.